Integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server and Azure

IBM Websphere MQ can be an overwhelming product to use as a message broker if you have worked in the past with Microsft’s MSMQ or the Azure Service Bus. The best way to learn and understand a product is to have your local lab environment, that you can recreate when needed.

With this post I share with you some links how you can setup your own local IBM MQ 9 installation for development purposes.

The default installation of IBM MQ has security turned on. Without disabling this you won’t be able to use your .NET client application or the BizTalk Adapter to send/receive messages. Be aware that you should only do this on your development environment!

Step 4: Add a firewall exclusion rule

If you are planning to host your local IBM MQ setup in a seperate VM, you will most likely need to setup a firewall exlusion rule so you can access the queue manager from another machine. (If you install IBM MQ as a service it will listen by default on all IP addresses)

Simply add an exclusion rule to allow inbound TCP traffic for the port your queue manager is running on (default is 1414).

In a previous blogpost I wrote about how you could use HIS2016 together with BizTalk 2013R2 (on Windows Server 2012R2) in order to use the MQSC adapter with IBM WebSphere MQ9.

This post is about upgrading an existing configured BizTalk 2013R2 environment without removing your current (port) configuration. By reading this description you should already know that this involves some “manual” actions…

These are the steps I followed to upgrade an already configured BizTalk 2013R2 with lots of MQSC SendPorts/ReceiveLocations where I didn’t want to remove all the current binding configuration (wich is what you need to do if you want to remove an adapter and follow the normal installation path…).

This worked for a running setup at my current customer. I cannot give you any garantees this will work on your envirenment! Always test this kinds of upgrades before applying this in your production environment!